The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life by Father James Martin was published in 2010. The book is an accessible introduction to Ignatian spirituality, a famous Catholic devotional practice developed in the 16th century by St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Father Martin, who left a career in corporate finance to become a Jesuit priest, is a prolific and popular writer on Catholic topics. He is an editor-at-large for America, a prominent Jesuit magazine, although he is probably more well-known for his appearances on The Colbert Report. Martin believes that Ignatian spirituality can be adapted for practice by anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic. He even offers adaptations of Ignatian spirituality for non-theists. This study guide refers to the first edition (2010) published by HarperCollins.

Summary

James Martin begins The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by describing the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th-century founder of the Society of Jesus (or the Jesuits, as they also known), a Catholic religious order. Martin defines spirituality as “a way of living in relationship with God,” and he explains that Ignatian spirituality was named for the founder of the Jesuits (2). Martin sums up Ignatian spirituality with four principles: “finding God in all things,” “contemplatives in action,” “incarnational spirituality,” and “freedom and detachment” (7-9). He then introduces the Spiritual Exercises, the series of meditations and prayers that Ignatius wrote and that form the basis of Ignatian spirituality. While Ignatian spirituality may stem from the Catholic tradition, Martin tells readers that it is available to anyone of any faith tradition—and even the faithless.

Martin is obviously a theist for whom even confusion about God is a way of approaching God, since finding God is the inner direction of a human. Conveying traditional doctrine that dates back at least as far as Augustine, Martin describes desire as the path by which we approach God. Desire “helps us know who we are to become and what we are to do” (59). That, in turn, helps people see what God wants for them. Next, Martin describes the examen, a system for daily prayer popularized by Ignatius. The examen has four steps: gratitude, recognition of error, reviewing the day, and asking God for forgiveness. Practicing the examen helps people see God’s presence in their lives, clarify their desires, and grow closer to God.

Having discussed various ways that people can recognize God, Martin turns to different types of prayer. He suggests that a key way to think about God in prayer is to think about maintaining a relationship with God, just as one would maintain a friendship. One can maintain this relationship by reading Scripture and stories about holy people. It is also important to be honest and to listen to God and to see where he is at work through one’s emotions, through changes in one’s life, and through silence. With this in mind, Martin introduces several forms of prayer, including Ignatian contemplation, lectio divina, and centering prayer, among other, perhaps more familiar forms.

In the next section, Martin looks at the three vows a Jesuit takes: poverty, chastity, and obedience. He describes what each of these vows meant to him for his own vocation as a Jesuit, and then he shows how people who are not members of religious orders can practice them, too. He emphasizes the value of simplicity in one’s life and encourages people to get to know the poor (poverty), to consider the value of friendships above sexual pleasures (chastity), and to listen to others for the sake of freeing oneself from pride and selfishness (obedience).

Then, Martin turns to discernment. This is a formal process of thinking over one’s vocation in light of one’s desires. It involves using Ignatian practices for seeing where one feels close to or far from God. One accomplishes this through prayer, but it also involves faith—trusting that a fulfilling path exists. A vocation is much more than the job that someone does; it involves one’s whole being. He encourages readers to think about how to find God in their work, especially if they are in a job that they do not enjoy. Borrowing from Catholic writer Chris Lowney, Martin enumerates four pillars of Jesuit leadership: self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism. To these, Martin adds the dignity of work, the acceptance of failure, and reliance on God.

Concluding the book, Martin returns to the four ways of understanding Ignatian spirituality that he mentioned at the beginning. He combines all four into the following statement: “Contemplatives in action seek to find God in all things by looking at the world in an incarnational way, and in their quest, they realize their desire for freedom and detachment, which helps them move even closer to God. That’s probably a fair summary of Ignatian spirituality” (392). He emphasizes that, in bringing in his own experiences throughout the book, he has sought to show that anyone can follow this never-ending Ignatian journey to being closer to God, which is its ultimate goal of Ignatian spirituality.